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Dec. 6th, 2007 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ewtSince I'll be offline all day and feel like having some good comments to come back to:
Do people have intrinsic worth as human beings? What is the difference between intrinsic worth and value within a society?
Are there intrinsic rights, or only those granted by society?
Does truthful gossip (that is, passing on true information about someone, rather than making up or passing on fictitious stories) form a positive or negative contribution to human society? How and why? Under what circumstances? Why does truthful gossip so often turn 'bad' somewhere along the chain and venture into the area of untruth?
Will the landlord recharge the electric meter by the time I get home today? It's looking a little low. I can laptop for a bit with no electricity but I can't interweb, because something has to run the router. EDIT: it seems to have gone over into emergency credit or something.
PLN for today:
-tidy up a bit here, because it is currently showing the effects of three days of rehearsal and running around with not much downtime or sorting out time
-go have horn lesson, meeting with CDP
-go to Isle of Cats, arriving about 13.15, do lots of big sorting and tidying
-come back here at some point; I'm going to aim for about 21.30 because I've had so many late nights recently.
The hardest thing? Moving the keyboard from the loft to the living room so that when someone comes to pick it up at 7pm they don't have to navigate (or even see) the rest of the house. This needs two strong people, because the keyboard is heavy. Once upon a time I could have been one of those people but this is no longer the case.
Do people have intrinsic worth as human beings? What is the difference between intrinsic worth and value within a society?
Are there intrinsic rights, or only those granted by society?
Does truthful gossip (that is, passing on true information about someone, rather than making up or passing on fictitious stories) form a positive or negative contribution to human society? How and why? Under what circumstances? Why does truthful gossip so often turn 'bad' somewhere along the chain and venture into the area of untruth?
Will the landlord recharge the electric meter by the time I get home today? It's looking a little low. I can laptop for a bit with no electricity but I can't interweb, because something has to run the router. EDIT: it seems to have gone over into emergency credit or something.
PLN for today:
-tidy up a bit here, because it is currently showing the effects of three days of rehearsal and running around with not much downtime or sorting out time
-go have horn lesson, meeting with CDP
-go to Isle of Cats, arriving about 13.15, do lots of big sorting and tidying
-come back here at some point; I'm going to aim for about 21.30 because I've had so many late nights recently.
The hardest thing? Moving the keyboard from the loft to the living room so that when someone comes to pick it up at 7pm they don't have to navigate (or even see) the rest of the house. This needs two strong people, because the keyboard is heavy. Once upon a time I could have been one of those people but this is no longer the case.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-12-06 12:54 pm (UTC)The INTERESTING question is to what extent OTHER animals have intrinsic worth. This, incidentally, is why the United States has creationists, anti-evolutionists, and Biblical literalists. They are people who believe that humans have intrinsic worth (although you wouldn't always be able to tell it from their actions), and who feel that, in order for that to be true, you have to draw a hard-and-fast line between humans and all other animals.
If you don't draw that line -- and Nature doesn't draw very many hard-and-fast lines: God and Nature are way more about shading from one thing into another -- and you believe that humans have intrinsic worth, that leads to the idea that other animals ALSO have intrinsic worth -- perhaps a lesser degree, but SOME. A chimpanzee, a dolphin, an African Grey parrot all have SOME degree of self-awareness and sapience, and therefore have some degree of intrinsic worth.
Which means that they have some degree of intrinsic rights.
The word "rights", as we're using it, means two related but very different things in this context. We can call them "human rights" and "legal rights", but, since I think that other animals besides humans also have some degree of these rights, I'll call them "intrinsic" or "inalienable rights" (after the phrasing of Thomas Jefferson, one of the writers of the founding documents of the United States), and "legal rights".
"Inalienable rights" are those which people -- or other animals -- have simply by the virtue of their existing. They are "granted by their Creator", which can mean "God", if you're theistic, but can simply mean Nature, or the plain fact of your existence, of you're not. And governments exist primarily to protect these inalienable rights.
Now, if a government DOESN'T protect, or even recognize the existence of, these rights, it doesn't mean that the people don't HAVE these rights. It simply means that that government is failing to do its duty.
This, of course, is why people are so terrified of the possibility of other creatures having inalienable rights -- if whales have a degree of sapience which means they have the right to not be murdered, well, Japan is in trouble. And my home state of Massachusetts has a HUGE historical moral debt to pay, since we were the home of the largest whaling fleet in history.